ADHD, IQ, and Giftedness

Thank you very much, Dr. Barkley for all your videos! I’m learning a lot

People with ADHD, without exception, are genius with immeasurable IQs, and are gods gift to humanity

Does this mean I can add 10 to my IQ score?

🙏🥰

our current systems are basically medieval, silly and doesn't yield the best results, doesn't cultivate talent in those who can't stand someone trying to force feed them boring bullshit versions of whatever subject they have an exam in. mathematics to a certain level should be required, but that is because it is pretty much unavoidable to have some rudimentary grasp of it in most studies. but beyond that i think the only requirement should be that the student can present readable essays and reports.

i was quite bored in school, i never really struggled, i knew how to do all the math in my head, didn't do any homework for the most part, but i was sleeping most of the time not restless. occasionally i would do some stuff for fun, or argue with the teacher, once i gave a philosophical address on mutual respect and the justification for any kind of authority to bust the substitute teachers balls a bit, but we were nice to that guy so who cares. while the other kids were doing boring shit i was thinking about kinetic gas theory or whatever else geometry and philosophy, or sleeping dreaming of random ass shit instead of paying attention, but i could still beat all of them in any subject or sport if i tried hard, was like that for me for most things throughout my schooling, in high school i didn't do what i perhaps should have done, i went to vocational school because i was fed up with learning arbitrary bs versions of subjects from people who barely knew anything about them, in high school i basically just thought other people shit and did my schoolwork in my head on the fly not opening any books because i understood the natural logic of the stuff i was working with, electricity, automation, cooling systems and electronics more than well enough to just wing everything. when i took some subjects later on to get exams done so i could go to university i also winged it, worked out fine enough. i could easily have gotten straight A's and gone to Harvard or Princeton at 15 i am pretty confident of that if i just worked hard, i didn't i instead sort of took a 6 year sabbatical with no employment just thinking about stuff, and i have learned more than i would in any of those places anyway. my issue is that in middle and high school you are dealing with very strange people who are evaluating your grades and teaching you stuff, not in all subjects the stem subjects are better, but i have found the other subjects to be much more about suiting the tastes of some boring person for the most part. personally i think high school middle school and primary school should only be about a general education, i think we should drop the whole concept of grades in those subjects, and only test for comprehension to evaluate progress, not to test ability, grading peoples ability to regurgitate the understanding of a field at the level of nonsense jargon is hardly useful for picking the best minds. you should take entrance exams at the end of high school for the studies you are going to study, and write for purposes of evaluation, i think the grading of potential and work ethic should be much more restricted, we should teach in a way that is inducive to thinking and research, not learning the regurgitate subject matter, which is what most of the stuff in high school seems to be about to me. there is no reason to take a test in history to be allowed to study mathematics, it is useless, and should promoted as part of a general education where grades are not to be even attempted to be set outside those who wish to study it further. why should we burden people with gaining an 8 bit version of every subject that is often wrong and uninformative, and doesn't really help you much when you study something else at university. we should abolish it, and we should give students more room to branch of and be interested in their own subjects earlier, taking classes on other things just to learn about them not to be evaluated in them .

i think there is also a correlation between chasing random patterns with improperly defined questions in iq tests, and in life, that is some tests like random matrix tests and sequence tests and so on, are often explained as having actual correct answers, and they simply don't. it measures a persons ability to find a simple pattern and to guess what the tester wants to hear. some of these matrix tests if you tried to apply rigor to them should have no definable answer to distinguish the options. this kind of blind pattern seeking is mostly what human ingenuity revolves around, but it also misses the more subtle analytical ability that is paramount in solving difficult real world problems in a real way, and not just a superficial way by fitting a pattern with no well motivated justification for it. a good example is the tendency of some academics to define their way to answers pretty much blindly, leading sometimes to very flawed arguments that work within a small novel system of reasoning they invented without really noticing. this is why the super high iq tests are basically not worth the paper they are written on, they measure the ability to spot a patter, which is for sure a part of what constitutes intelligence, but i would trust hard maths problems much more than most of these types of question sets.

I’m 99% sure I have Inattentive adhd. Felt as though through school I was stupid because it was tough to discipline myself. The typical cramming before a deadline, seeking novelty and the like. I was capable of 3.88gpa in school but that was inconsistent. Later in life I’ve built my own business and primarily have learned strategies to compensate for it such as a routine. Even though I felt stupid in school, later in life I guess my IQ is roughly in the average range. I’m not a genius but I’m not a Dullard either. Routine m(predictability) helped me tremendously. Some days it is boring but helps keep a functional life together.
We also told ourselves add is a superpower because CEO’s likely had it. Eh, maybe, not convinced but it. It’s obnoxious having a brain deficient in dopamine/serotonin.

Present day people have higher IQ than for example people 100 years ago, partly because of education. Couldn't the part of the bias of people with ADHD have the same origin? Present day education is still rather poorly targeted to ADHD brain, and therefore one with ADHD don't get as good an education base as someone with neurotypical brain?

I would actually suspect a slight negative correlation because the higher the IQ the higher the abilities to compensate.

the first 4 on the end of the list are considered adhd symptoms

my actual IQ is inconclusive, I got a test result that was too high that the test broke. I was forced to take an IQ test, because the principal wanted to remove me from school. instead i thought it was a game and did so well, that a large number of administrators were called in and my dad who never took time of work suddenly showed up at noon. The Principal when he got me alone said “ i guess you aren’t a retard my boy,”

Diagnosed ADHD at age four. IQ tested at age five and then again at age 16, both times found to be around 147-152, with special note that score might have been higher due to some very creative answers. I always excelled in school academically and yet was incredibly hyperactive and struggled with focus. I would agree with other commenters that the giftedness helped to compensate for the disability.

Dear Dr Russell,

I will tell you why I think you got it wrong. 🤔

1). The first question is How accurate it is to generalize the results of the studies done on groups of children to adults with ADHD as people with ADHD? (isn't it that the concept of IQ becomes more complicated when it comes to adults like domain-specific IQ or domain-specific creativity specially with people with ADHD )

2). 2nd question is What were the diagnosis criteria of ADHD for those children and adults, was it a more modern holistic approach or just some psychometric assessment diagnosis (because whatever the statistical properties X, Y, and Z you calculate heavily biased on how you diagnose ADHD)

3). The most important point is that the fundamental characteristic of people with ADHD is each individual with ADHD is unique. if that is the case then simply calculating the average and Modeling it as a normal distribution indeed doesn't provide accurate insight.

4). You can see it like the following, if the fundamental characteristic of people with ADHD is that each case is unique, then each individual {A1, A2...An} has properties(IQ, creativity, etc) let's say Q1a1 and Q2a1 then those properties come from their own distributions. (I must say that this is just a model but it aligns with the nature of our data, each case is unique) , my point is in the case of IQ or other properties of individuals with ADHD, simply modeling it as a normal distribution doesn't align with the nature of our data, so all the statistics we calculate on top of that are often misleading, too generalized and lots of valuable insights are missing.

I took an IQ test twice. I've come out 122-125 😔 I've also been diagnosed with ADHD twice now out of 3 therapists. But I found out the third one was just lying to me because I realized later he was giving me behavior mod treatments that the other 2 gave me to treat my ADHD. I hate being average. But whatever.

Not sure how useful any of this data is when you consider the limitations. Lots of intelligent or high functioning individuals would be undiagnosed due to developing or learning coping methods to get by. Many of which dont even know that they have adhd, many who do know but do not get a diagnosis because they are able to adapt to normal every day life. This means that more of the data is comprised of individuals who skew towards the lower end of the IQ spectrum with more severe symptoms which is what led them to get the diagnosis in the first place.

I find the entire concept of "ADHD" toxic as all hell and consider the diagnosis to be bullshit. What is the so-called "disorder"? Drugging people outside the norm is dangerous behavior.

As a child I was never been able to escape the fact that homework and tests were useless. I just couldn't care. I cared that my mother would be mad later if I did not perform, but when compared to days and months of homework? I'd still take a slap and no dinner over that.

This is really interesting. I thought some of my creativity and forward thinking was a trait of my ADHD. This evidence makes me know think I’m smart despite my ADHD lol. And now that I think about it I went from failing chem 1 to getting student of the year in biochemistry after beginning treatment so yea makes sense. But now that I made a whole career that dependent on me being “gifted” I literally cannot stop taking medication and that is a depressing thought. Plus I miss the euphoria I would naturally feel in my unmedicated state.

Maybe the belief that ADHD correlates with giftedness is a product of observations within a social class.

If ADHD negatively affects one's career progression, on average, then it should follow that people with ADHD land positions that rank slightly lower than their level of giftedness predicts. This would explain the proliferation of anecdotes like "this ADHD guy at work is the smartest in our department".

Perhaps there is no contradiction between the popular trope and statistical data as a whole, as the former is true within typical subsets of the latter. Our peers may see what is exceptional, but we need it to compensate for what is regrettable.

Psychedelics are just an exceptional mental health breakthrough. It's quite fascinating how effective they are against depression and anxiety. Saved my life.

I was diagnosed at 21, started treatment at 22. Basically, I only really went after the diagnosis because I was failing college.

My IQ was 124 at the age of 16 and had ADHD since childhood. But I stopped believing IQ test.

I am extremely gifted. A true intellectual outlier and I have been working hard to raise my hand to help the world with my gifts. Why am I still dismissed?

Explains why i got above most of my class when i prepared 30 minutes before exam and get higth score when i felt school was too boring and my attendance was low😮my teacher always told only if you attended the classes you would get great points❤❤❤

ADHDer here with about a 135 IQ, I’d agree about the test interference with some IQ tests.

For some, you get 8 images and need to guess the 9th and it’s culmination of like 4 or 5 separate patterns, but for me, I can hardly hold more than 3 things in my head, so whilst I’m working out the 4th or 5th pattern, the 1st or 2nd pattern (which I am capable of figuring out) has now left my head, so I’m there working out the same thing multiple times,

And it sucks because I know the test takes completion time into consideration.

So it makes me wonder, imagine it I had the ability to keep more things in my short term memory like neurotypical people, would I get an even higher score?

And yes, I wasn’t diagnosed until 28

It’s kinda curious that add and adhd have all been slumped into one category a couple years ago and now all of the sudden “in the past years” adhd isn’t a gift. If your brain is constantly processing information at a more consistent and faster rate than people with (originally add and recent yslumped into one) I get that they don’t want true adhd “suffering people” aren’t intellectually higher. I’ve had a conversation with someone where when they were younger they were dishonored with ADD. And they’ve gotten ‘help’ from “professionals” they learned add and adhd is categorized into one. You have true adhd you are gifted. They want to bring down those with adhd and categorize ones with slower mental processing and brain functions speeds all into one. If you have true adhd you will realize you didn’t sit there at any point in your life with out a million thoughts running constantly through your Brain. Sure maybe the amount of those that can actually process those thoughts and convert them into real life uses are slimmer. But as I iterated earlier, they recently categorized ADD and and ADHD as one extent “mental health issue”. True ADHD is a gift. So long as you can handle the capacity to make it a gift and not a true ‘ADD’ mental disorder. Don’t let a pill or the government bring you down gifted few.

IQ tests are a very good mesure of how good people are at IQ tests. You can train and get better scores.

The problem with adhd is that it doesn’t help with goals that require sustained effort. Not good for corporate life or even in business.

However, I do think there is a link between autism and high intelligence.

It's odd, cus I feel more smart than about half the people I see around. But then struggle with communication comprehension and math badly. Got a 90 on an IQ test after getting bored and just auto filling the last third. So I am probably average. But I feel so inconsistent. The toll on self esteem is major.

What is intelligence?

To answer a question about "intelligence", someone has to decide what intelligence actually is, which can't be done. Only an overall estimation can be decided by individuals. These individuals can vary from test to test. From estimation to estimation. <Endless possibilities>.
It's very creative to be a good liar, but is lying a good way to solve a problem? It's very intelligent to build a rocket, but is building a rocket good for the environment? How intelligent is it to present studies done by people you personally done know and have no idea why they did them? Career? Curiosity? 1.000.000 other reasons? <Endless possibilities>.

If you put all these arguments together, you'll end up with <endless possibilities> and <endless debatable answers>. Instead of trying to answer an impossible question, use the time to find possible answers like "How can I help this particular individual?".

I was identified as gifted at age 8 or 9, and diagnosed with ADHD at age 45.

I think that for me there is one word that makes the connection between giftedness and ADHD: interest.

I was interested in school and in learning, which is why I think that I thrived in gifted education.

At least some ADHD experts have characterized the condition as "having an interest-based attention system."

From my perspective, that makes sense.

I got diagnosed with ADHD 3 years ago & got 125+ an IQ test, it made sense of all the struggles I had, where I am high achieving academically, perfectionist, interested in many things but find difficulty focusing on things that bore me or face burn out. I’m starting my masters in information technology management so I began to learn more about ways I can channel this in a conductive way.

What I'm going with is that the "gifted" concept with ADHD is that people with ADHD are all over the board with what they are interested in. It is that breadth of experience and likelihood to apply that difference of view that they bring to the table is what creates the appearance of giftedness.

Oh boy, you're just gonna hate this post. Allow me to elaborate my belief in most of the claims that probably drive you crazy. Nah, I won't really cite much evidence

People with ADHD primarily test lower on working memory and processing speed measures, both of which have low g correlations compared to verbal, perceptual, and quantitative tests. An IQ test that weighted g correlation instead of factoring unequal subtests as if they're equal would increase the average IQ for people with ADHD. I also think those measures are somewhat more like the fundamental capacities composing potential intelligence, rather than the final product, "intelligence." Like rating a quarterback by how far he can throw instead of by how many touchdowns he actually scored. His maximum throwing distance might not matter very often in realistic situations, and other factors could be far more important in determining his success. I think that's why WM and PS g correlations are comparatively low

I hear so many conflicting claims about everything that it's really impossible to know what analyses to trust. Anyone who knows gifted people can tell you that autism or pronounced broader autism phenotype become standard as IQ rises above 130. The famous paper "Autism: A disorder of high intelligence" attests to that as well. And there is supposed to be somewhere between a 30 to 60% comorbidity between autism and ADHD (again, estimates vary so widely that you wonder if any of them are valid). So if both of these suppositions are true, I don't see how there could NOT be a disproportionately high incidence of ADHD among gifted people.

I think it's also possible that these effects don't start showing up strongly until ~145+, in which case the test data would be small. For IQs of 160, I doubt there would be sufficient data to say anything at all. I know many people who hit the ceiling on WAIS-4 from an online community, and I can't think of one without obvious autistic traits. ADHD is more debatable. Basically everyone with a very high IQ is an information addict, and that looks a great deal like frantic ADHD research, pinging from one unrelated article to the next. The core trait of high emotionality is also heavily present in both groups. There's a lot of overlap

But it doesn't mean they have the same root causes, treatments, or overall profile. It's easy to mistake one thing for another when it wears the same clothes. But my general impression of exceptionally gifted people is that we tend to have about a half-case of numerous mental illnesses. Schizophrenia and ADHD for globalized thinking, OCD and autism for localized thinking, BPD for the emotionality that drives excessive cognition (low latent inhibition), bipolarity as the natural result of our excessive energy and the crashes that result from the unsustainable lifestyles it creates (I know a guy who only used to sleep every 4 or 5 days. I personally used to only sleep every other night). Or maybe the depression is just because our lives generally suck 🤷‍♂

I think verbally gifted people tend more toward mental illness. Creativity, divergent thinking, hypotheticality: these are the demons of stability. Explicit verbal reasoning is maybe 100,000 years old. Visual systems are as old as the first photoreceptive cell. Which one do we think is more stable? Some gifted people can be much more visual and perceptual in their reasoning, and they seem to me to be your typical autistic engineer types: more politically conservative, less empathetic and expressive, less creative. But more emotionally stable with notably better executive functioning. And then there's the typical verbal person: wilder, more divergent, mischievously humorous, unstable. More like someone with ADHD. This is basically the typical thinker/builder distinction

Sometimes both of these aspects are heavily crammed into the same person. And to me that's the gist of being excessively gifted: too much complexity that stems from the interplay of conflicting internal forces. People who have too much positive emotion AND too much negative. People who are too harm-avoidant and ALSO too novelty-seeking. Too much growth, too much pruning. Just too much. When these opposing rubber bands roughly balance out, you get functional giftedness. When they don't, you get broken brains. I think that's a reasonable explanation for autism having such fat tails on the intelligence distribution: when your brain is blasted with 40% more cortical stimulation than an average human, life is a trial by fire that can either forge you solid or melt you alive

I test as a creative genius in the 130s. I would have happily traded some IQ points for an earlier ADHD diagnosis.
I used my big brain to mask/compensate and so only finally got diagnosed at 38 yrs old. It was a relief for me, gave me more self-compassion for the things I have previously been ashamed to admit I have difficulty with (that less intelligent people seem to find easy).
It's frustrating to be smart and not able to focus and use my skills to do more good in the world. I have a hard time finishing anything or keeping a job :(
Being recently medicated, seems to help me with focus, but not on focusing on the RIGHT things, lol

Untreated and undiagnosed I was measured at around a 130+ IQ in my early teens. Once I had been diagnosed, the severity of my ADHD was noted to be quite substantial (though it's inattentive in nature), and was placed on the maximum dosage. I've only recently started taking medication for it again (several years later), and once again have been put on the maximum dosage.

Here watching this at 2x speed, and finding all this actually tracks.

IQ 116 Lol! I don't even understand how levers work.

Correlation!
Autism/ADHD = pattern recognition.
IQ tests = patterns.

Both ADHD and IQ are heritable traits and I'd be very surprised if the IQ differences are purely for environmental reasons. It's true that sort of high-functioning ADHD'ers tend to miss the radar and end up in the non-ADHD group. However, even if we were to somehow take this into account, that doesn't necessarily mean that the true intelligence distributions will line up exactly with each other.

Just scattering my thoughts into the comments section, not addressing any particular claim in the video (except for maybe some other comments floating around).

Just something to keep in mind: Small differences in the mean can imply big differences in the extreme ends (assuming a perfect normal distribution fits in reality, though).

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!!!!

I am slow, have problems with the part that is time based in IQ test not the other part. I feel the slowniness is affecting my score. From Sweden, main diagnose ADD bidiagnose Asperger. Most problems in my social life is Self-regulated emotion.

I have ADHD, and I flunk out of college. lol

Is chronic stress controlled for in the reduced IQ? That would explain a lot, in my opinion.